Bond's car collection comes to London

Aston Martin descends on the capital to celebrate 007’s rather special stash…

James Bond didn’t start out driving an Aston Martin, neither in the films nor the masterfully dark original books by Ian Fleming. But the way the brand has become inextricably intertwined with Her Majesty’s least subtle secret agent, you’d have thought Bond had ‘David Brown’ tattooed across his buttocks.

Not many people realise that Bond’s first car was actually a 4.5-litre, pre-war Bentley; specifically, the one with the Amherst-Villiers supercharger, in Ian Fleming’s original Casino Royale novel way back in 1953.

Why are we telling you this? Well, this weekend the Aston Martin Owner’s Club provided a 30-car Aston parade to welcome the world’s largest official collection of James Bond cars, which moved to the London Film Museum on Sunday. And as one onlooker noted, to him, it doesn’t matter which DB-series cars were used in the films. Aston Martin is Bond.